Boston Marathon 2013: Scituate runner was fifty feet from finish

As Marathon Monday approaches, Cassi Belmarsh said she is getting a little nervous.

Ruth Thompson rthompson@wickedlocal.com @scituateruth

As Marathon Monday approaches, Cassi Belmarsh said she is getting a little nervous.

The Scituate resident ran the Boston Marathon – her first time – last year and was 50 feet from the finish line when the first bomb went off. She is planning on running the marathon again next week.

“I know it’s not going to happen again, but I’m still emotional,” she said. “These past few weeks have been hard.”

Belmarsh said she never thought about an attack after the bomb went off.

“Then the smoke clears and you see the mass chaos.”

As she and the other runners around her were trying to make sense of what was going on, she said marathon security telling them to turn around and run back to Boylston Street.

“There were maybe 100 runners standing there trying to figure out what was happening, and then the second bomb goes off,” she said.

Belmarsh said she crouched over, covering her face, feeling the need to protect herself.

“I didn’t know what to do,” she said. “People were knocking down those barriers along the sides of the road, running in all directions.”

She said a stranger on the opposite side of the barrier in front of Lord & Taylor motioned for her and some of the other runners.

“He showed me his badge, but he was in plain clothes,” she said, adding the man brought the group to an unnoticeable underground area where trucks would make their deliveries to the nearby stores.

“We stayed there, I don’t know for how long,” she said. “It felt like a half an hour, but it could have been just five minutes.”

Beyond their hidden shelter, she said people were out in the streets running and screaming. The sound of sirens was everywhere.

“I told them I couldn’t stay,” Belmarsh said. “My husband and my boys were supposed to be at the finish line waiting for me. I had been that close. I had to try to find them, so I left by myself and started walking, with my body pressed against the building wall and holding my hands over my head. It was like something in the movies, I felt the buildings were going to start coming down.”

Belmarsh had been running with the Boston Children’s Hospital team. A mother of three sons, she said she wanted to run for Children’s Hospital because of the care one of her sons, now age 10, received when he fell ill as a toddler.

Last year she ran for a little girl struggling with health issues – her “patient partner.” Patient partners are patients of Children’s Hospital that runners from the team are matched up with.

“That’s who you run for,” Belmarsh said. “For example, if your patient partner has cystic fibrosis, the money you raise will go towards cystic fibrosis at Children’s Hospital.”

This year she is running for another little girl.

Up until the day of the marathon, she said the most memorable thing for her was training for the marathon.

“From December until April I drove from Scituate to Wellesley every Saturday morning for the team run,” she said. “The whole house would be asleep, the whole South Shore would be asleep, and I would be driving along an empty highway at 7:45 a.m. so I could join my team at 8 a.m.”

Now 42 years old, Belmarsh said she started running at age 37.

“I ran a lot of half marathons and thought I wanted to do the Boston Marathon,” she said, adding that prior to Boston she had run a marathon in Florida. “I was really excited about running the Boston Marathon.”

After the bombings, Belmarsh headed to the Westin Hotel, where Children’s Hospital had a spot.

“I asked two people if I could use their cell phones, but calls weren’t going through,” she said. “At that time, no one at the (Prudential Center) knew what was going on. People were still walking around. People thought there had been a shooting in the food court.”

Using the landline in one of the nearby shops, Belmarsh said she was able to reach her husband.

He and the boys were outside of the Lenox Hotel. They had been at the finish line just before the bombs went off, but the kids were hungry so they went to get pizza.

The family was going to reunite at the Children’s Hospital spot at the Westin.

“I was a 10-minute walk from where they were at the Lenox,” she said.

It would be an hour and a half before she would see them.

“That time waiting was terrible.”

Returning home to Scituate, she said she cried a lot and was “really shaken up.”

“I couldn’t sleep,” she said. “I couldn’t get off Boylston Street in my head. I was stuck right there. All I could see was what happened after the first explosion.”

She said she’s been in therapy this past year due to the experience.

“She’s given me good advice,” Belmarsh said of her therapist. “I just have to feel what I feel, and not be too hard on myself.”

She said she decided to run this year for Children’s Hospital.

“I get a rollercoaster feeling in my belly,” she said of running this year. “But I’m running for this adorable little 3-year-old girl, and you have to stick to your motivation as to why you’re there. And that’s why I’m there.”